Most of the traffic I receive on this site is from people looking for additional information about the small, inexpensive touch screen LCDs commonly sold on eBay. While I’m not an expert on these screens, I’ll be happy to help provide all of the information I can and update this post regularly. I also ask… Read More »

I was recently contacted by a representative from ITEAD Studios and asked if I would be interested in taking a look at their new smart home switches. It looked like a fun product, so I happily agreed. My samples arrived a few days ago, and I’ve had a little time to play with them, so… Read More »

My nine-year-old son wanted a quadcopter this Christmas, an idea I was honestly a little excited about myself. After a bit of investigation, the Syma X5C-1 appeared to be the perfect option, offering great stability and the ability to fly it outdoors. As a bonus, it also comes with a built-in HD camera. I was… Read More »

I recently needed to add the ability to perform mass actions to Magento’s order screen. I’m far from being a Magneto expert, but I was able to find several examples online that got me part of the way there. After some experimentation and learning, I finally succeeded in adding the most crucial feature we were… Read More »

This is the second and probably final part of my Roomba virtual wall project. In my first post, I talk more about the technical details that of how the signalling works, etc., so I recommend it as a starting point. In this post, I’ll talk about how I put it all together and deployed. This… Read More »

Recently, my neighbors asked me if I wanted their old Kettler ping pong table. Imagining all the family fun we’d have, I gladly accepted. The table is aluminum and meant to be outdoors, which is good news because it has been for the past 15-20 years. It’s mostly in great shape, but on one side… Read More »

This is an addition to my post about the Touch Screen Shield for Arduino UNO, so if you’ve landed here, that may be a good place to start for more information. Several people have asked about using this touch screen shield with the Arduino Mega, but I didn’t have much advice to offer because I… Read More »

My goal for this project was two-fold. First, I wanted to create an in-car media player capable of storing enough videos and music to keep things interesting for my kids on long trips. Although my car came equipped with a DVD player, storing discs in the car and constantly swapping them in and out, not… Read More »

If there’s one disadvantage to using a wireless keyboard, it’s not knowing the status of the Caps Lock. This becomes particularly frustrating when you’re in a terminal window, for example, and realize the Caps Lock is on only after a few failed attempts to enter a password. I wrote this utility for the Mac that… Read More »

This isn’t much of a post, but I’ll put it here for anyone (especially a current tutoring student) who needs it. The SoundClip class I’ve provided can be used to load and play an audio file from within the current JAR’s res folder. Usage In this example, the code will load the file “res/sounds/brick-hit.wav” and… Read More »